Drawing upon new evidence first made available in 2014, the first paper in this series – The Burial of Nefertiti? (Nefertiti? I) – argued for a radical reassessment of the tomb of Tutankhamun (KV 62). The proposals there put forward and subsequently developed were: that Tutankhamun’s four small funerary chambers are to be recognized not as the abandoned vault of a high-ranking court official, but as the outer portion of a much larger sepulchre; that this larger KV 62 had been initiated for a queen – Akhenaten’s principal consort, Nefertiti; and that, a decade before Tutankhamun’s own burial here, KV 62 had been employed by Nefertiti in her capacity as Akhenaten’s successor, Smenkhkare. A second paper, published in 2019 – The Decorated North Wall in the Tomb of Tutankhamun (KV 62) (Nefertiti? II) – would provide key support for this initial analysis, identifying the presence, on the north, of an original imagery and inscriptions relating to the burial of Nefertiti/Smenkhkare herself.

Building upon Nefertiti? I-II, the present Supplementary Notes (Nefertiti? III) have a double purpose: (1) to summarise and contextualize the argument, demonstrating by means of computer animation that the evidence on which Nefertiti? I-II draws is real and of the highest significance; and (2) to counter a widely circulated, opposing claim, based on a single radar survey undertaken in 2017, that there is nothing more to KV 62 than was known to Howard Carter in 1922.

Nefertiti? III concludes that the proposals put forward in 2015 and 2019 remain valid: that the evidence does indeed support the view that Tutankhamun – accompanied by a funerary equipment designed for Nefertiti as the co-regent Neferneferuaten – had been interred within the outer section of the pre-existing tomb of the young king’s ruling predecessor, Nefertiti/Smenkhkare, KV 62’s first and presumably still-present owner.